Home of "The Smallest Theatre in the World," in which Dickens and Collins first staged The Frozen Deep in 1857.

Source: Forster, II, 89

Tavistock Street, which runs north of the Strand and south of Covent Garden,
lends its name to fashionable Tavistock Square in Bloomsbury, west london, where
Charles Dickens lived from 1851 to 1860. Here, too, his first published story,
"The Bloomsbury Christening:" (later re-titled "Mr. Minns and His Cousin") is
set. His tenancy of No. 1 Devonshire Terrace having expired in the autumn of
1851, Dickens acquired the lease on the mansion from his friend and fellow
Shakespeare Society member, the artist Frank Stone, A. R. A., one of the team
that illustrated the last of the Christmas Books, The Haunted Man, in the
autumn of 1848

[This image may be used without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose.]

While living at Tavistock House, Dickens wrote Bleak
House, Hard Times For These Times, Little Dorrit, and A Tale
of Two Cities, and collaborated with Wilkie Collins on the melodrama The
Frozen Deep. For the initial production of this play, as well as for The
Lighthouse, and the children's plays William Tell, Tom Thumb,
and Fortunio and His Seven Gifted Servants, Dickens converted the house's
large schoolroom into "The Smallest Theatre in the World." The first such play
presented there during his first Twelfth Night entertainments the burlesque
Guy Fawkes by Alfred Smith.

Preparations for the private play had gone on incessantly up to
Christmas [1856], and, in turning the schoolroom into a theatre, sawing and
hammering worthy of Babel continued for weeks. the priceless help of [artist
Clarkson] Stanfield had again been secured, and I remember finding him one day at
Tavistock House in the act of upsetting some elaborate arrangements by Dickens,
with a proscenium before him made up of chairs, and the scenery planned out with
walking-sticks. But Dickens's art in a matter of this kind was to know how to
take advice; and no suggestion came to him that he was not ready to act upon, if
it presented the remotest likelihood. [Forster, II, 134]

After three months of feverish preparation, The Frozen Deepwas first
performed on 6 January 1857 to a select audience by an amateur cast composed of
Dickens's friends and family, with CD himself in the role of the self-sacrifing
Richard Wardour. In 1857, Dickens achieved the boyhood dream of acquiring Gad's
Hill Place, Higham-by-Rochester, Kent, at about the same time that he met Ellen
Lawless Ternan; the following year, he and Catherine separated, and it was then
only a matter of time before he quitted the London residence where he and his
family had spent so many happy times together. In August, 1860, he sold Tavistock
House for two thousand guineas, and moved out the following month; all the
mouldings and pictures were translated to Gad's Hill Place.